Monday, November 28, 2011

There's been a lot of talk about the demise of the picture book. Parent Tracy Grant summarized the heated debate in this piece in the Washington Post. Maurice Sendak chimed in to say that the picture book is blighted by misguided notions of childhood innocence, although he admits at the same time that he hasn't read very many lately. Some of us who watched the National Book Awards streaming from New York recently were a little perturbed by celebrity writer John Lithgow's attempts to be funny. In the process of self-deprecation he managed to dismiss the entire form of the picture book by suggesting it wasn't "real."

Is it, as Karen Lotz, Candlewick publisher suggests in the NYT article that started the brouhaha, a matter of the picture book being an analog artifact in a digital age? I'm not so sure. The codex book might be analog in structure but the picture book, if we pay attention to how young children "read" it, is far from analog in application.

Adults may read it from front to back and left to right but look at this child poised to turn a page.

Left? Right? Depends? If the book topples and ends up upside down in the process, a two-year-old might continue "reading" it that way. Nothing linear about that.

Toddlers react to the whole book as an object, without privileging the words on the page. They also react to the voice and the presence of an adult reading to them. They memorize text (another skill we tend not to privilege for some odd reason) and will often catch the lazy adult reader trying to flip two pages at once. Young children will want to visit a beloved book over and over, as they define it for themselves auditorily and visually, finding comfort in prediction. And of course they will imitate the reading behaviors (or lack thereof) of the adults in their lives. In all these ways, the picture book is meant to be a multi-sensory experience.

Its future is obviously tied up with the future of the book itself. But as with hybrid cars, we haven't quite found the right combination of green, cheap, tough, and accessible, not yet. Meanwhile, the codex book with pictures continues to allow children to acquire meaning in the often ambiguous spaces between text and image, and to do so with their entire bodies, which is what young children need to do. Speculating on causation in a narrative is a very different skill from touching a screen to create it. The two are not interchangeable, nor is one better than the other. But they are different.

If we let the picture book slip away while we dither around trying to decide if the form is dead, then the thing we may be endangering is the potential of the young child's brain to take in multiple stimuli, find meaning, react with all senses at once, and thereby create the active engagement with the world that we call literacy.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

I tried to write something I would like to read, and my
favorite genre is midgrade. Also, I honestly can't gauge the reading
taste of anyone else. (Though I've tried, and my editors and agent
usually tell me I'm wrong. For example, I allowed myself to think of my
potential audience as "boys" when rats--a lot of rats--entered the story
during the first draft. Later, my editor told me that my primary
audience would be girls. So what do I know?)

The book has a
fair number of long sentences and big words, because that's what I like
to write, and read. And because I hated it when some critiquers told me
to simplify if I wanted to sell it, and I wanted to prove them wrong.
(Lots of what I accomplish in writing is out of spite, I have come to
realize.)

I had...to turn a new book in to my editor within a 6-8 week period. A book I had barely begun to think about, let alone write. I had just launched The Healing Spell and hadn't received any of those first, wonderful fan letters from kids around the country who were begging for another book like it, so I was writing this story just for me, which is how every story begins. Although this time my editor was hoping for a beautiful, poignant family story with a vulnerable, troubled girl like The Healing Spell contained. The pressure was on in spades! But when I say I was writing this book for myself, I am literally talking about the stories I love to read - stories I loved to read when I was 9-13 years old and stories I still love to read and never stopped reading even when I became an official grown-up.

Since I love weaving my character's relationships together in various emotional ways, as well as concocting a plot with some suspense and twists - I'm still thinking about that child reader in me, but I also start thinking about the readers out there who want an exciting story with surprises....Of course, this usually doesn't occur until the first draft is completed. Before that I'm too worried about actually getting the story down...in some sort of coherent and chronological sense. During my second and third drafts I'm honing the depth of the characters and making sure all the little connections and surprises in the plot works, and fixing holes and inconsistencies, etc. During revisions and the production work with my editor, I start really dreaming about the kids out there who (I hope!) are going to connect with the book. Now that Circle of Secrets has launched, it's happening: letters are coming in from adult readers who tell me the story describes their own feelings and situation when they were kids as well as kid readers who love the small, secret connections within the story. Once the book is out in the world, hearing that kind of marvelous feedback makes me feel like the readers and I are connected in a very special, magical way.

...a lady in our church
informed me that her daughter "hated" Claudia. I simply told her that
everybody doesn't like everything, and one had to understand and accept
that, and one shouldn't be angered by hearing an opinion, even though
negative. A year later, that same woman, with girl in tow,
pushed her toward me after church. "I just loved Claudia!" said the
child. Well, a year older and better able to understand what Claudia was
going through then. This happens often. But I never gave a thought to who might or might not like the story when I wrote it.

And,
of course, there's Peppermints in the Parlor. Even grown-ups have
read and told me that they enjoyed, even loved, the story. As usual, I
never gave a thought to who might read it or like it when I was writing
it. I simply sailed around the moon when Jim Trelease and others
referred to it as "Dickensian"! Charles Dickens...my hero! I wonder if he might have liked it?

Ah, yes, the conversation of books. Perhaps that's the real reason we write, because we need to talk back to books we have loved or loathed, resented or revered.

This post itself will be an all-day group interview in response to a single question. Years ago, Mem Fox wrote a piece in Bookbird journal titled "For Whom Do We Write?" It can also be found in variant grammatical mode under the title, "So Who Are We Writing For?" In
it she talked about sending all potential readers out of the room when
you write a book--silencing all those possible voices that hover around
the writer, seeking to influence the work. She says only then can she
allow the work itself to take shape. Audience has always been of
interest to writers, perhaps most of all to those whose work is read by
young readers. Maurice Sendak once used to hate being called a children's writer.

I'm asking a group of children's and YA writers to think of one of their books--any one--as they answer these two questions:

Who was your audience when you wrote this book?

At what stage in the life of the work in progress did you allow that potential audience into your mind?

My
original audience was a boy, someone who resembled my own son when he
was around thirteen or fourteen years old. It was an incident that
occurred with him that gave me the impetus for the story to begin with.
So I had him in the back of my mind over the course of writing, but I
confess that as I got deeper into the story, I actually lost track of
any audience at all. It felt as though I was writing for the story
itself and the characters in the story, as if they were the only
“audience” that mattered. I kept writing and writing and writing until
it seemed like I got the characters’ stories right within the context of
the bigger story. I was writing to find the stories that my characters
had to show me.
It seems like the intended audience was the first and then the last
thing that I kept in mind.

Tom Birdseye's most recent novel, Storm Mountain (trailer here) began on a the 41-mile
Timberline Trail that circles Mt. Hood, the highest mountain in Oregon. He describes the experience:

Halfway around, gazing up at yet another stunning view of the iconic
peak, it suddenly occurred to me that although I loved mountains and
scaling them, I had, in fact, never written anything with a climbing
focus. What was with that? Why not combine two of my passions -- writing
and the alpine realm? It was a head-slapping moment, and in it a book
idea was born. I'll write a middle-grade adventure story, I declared,
set in the high Cascades. So the audience, middle grade readers, was set
in my mind very quickly.

It
wasn't until I was well into the first draft that it began to dawn on
me that this wasn't just a climbing adventure, it was also a story about
the grief that the protagonist, Cat, feels at the loss of her father.
My father died when I was young. I never really processed his passing --
I didn't know how -- and instead pushed the pain aside and moved on
with my life. Writing Storm Mountain became a conduit for finally
dealing with a scarred-over wound. In the end it was a much for an
audience of one -- me -- as it was for kids.

Shutta Crum comments on the differences in audience awareness between novels and picture books. Her picture book, Mine! just made School Library Journal's list of Best Books of 2011.

I'd hazard a guess that most writers don't think of a particular
audience--other than themselves--when they are first creating. I don't.
Sometimes I don't even start to think about the audience until my
editor makes me think about it.
At some point, when a novel is ready to submit, I simply give it over to
my agent/editor. I always figure that a good book will find its
audience.
It is not until after the editor has her hands on it that I worry about
word choice, white space, sentence length, etc., all those kinds of
things that one worries about with an audience of a particular age.
The one exception to this, I find, is when I am working on a picture
book for the very young, such as Mine! (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).
For that book my editor challenged me to write for the very youngest of
audiences. So I had my audience firmly in mind. The book ended up only
having 10 1/2 words.

I found that Trash had more boy
readers than Painters did, at least I got more mail from boys. At first I
thought that might be because of the graffiti writing in it, but later I
learned that the boys liked the poetry, too. Just about all the readers
who wrote to me mentioned liking the white space on the page.

I
thought a lot more about the audience when I was writing Trash than when
I was writing Painters, partly because I was thinking about how the
words looked on the page, almost as if that were a part of the graphic
aspect of the book and I was hoping my audience would enjoy that.

When
I was writing Painters, I felt like I was the audience for the
character as she 'told' me her story, then when I was revising the words
for the readers so that they might be able to 'hear' her voice, I
thought about how words sound when spoken and about how feelings come
through the sounds a voice gives to words. I hoped my audience would be
able to experience Pert's voice in a way similar to the way it had come
to me, except I wanted the reader to feel much more like she or he were
living the story along with Pert as it happened. The revisions were for
my imagined young teen-aged reader, mostly girls I thought, but, in a
way, I imagined Pert herself reading and deciding if I'd done a good job
writing her story!

Jane Kurtz has written two picture books with her brother, Only a Pigeon (soon to have a new edition with a new title, Pigeon Boys of Ethiopia) and Water Hole Waiting. They've also worked on a novel together. Here's Jane's take on audience and co-authorship:

We've
also worked on a novel together. One of the interesting things that
happens with a co-author is that we both get audience reaction right
away...from each other! I will think some word or sentence is funny or
apt or touching or just right in some other way, only to discover that
it falls flat for Chris--and vice versa. We argue for our choices. Often
we talk about audience as part of that because it's useless to say,
"Well, I'm doing this because it pleases ME" if it doesn't please the
other person. With this new edition of Only a Pigeon, we had the
advantage of having tried our story with lots of actual elementary aged
kids so we talked about what confused or frustrated or interested or
amused kids as we revised. I kind of wish I could now re-do all my
books.

As a general target audience, I had in
mind young children who have hesitated when asked to do something brave,
as a way to suggest that courage often comes in small packages and
doesn't look like what we think it's going to look like. I knew right
away that what I had to say was for a young audience, picture book age,
because I imagined it as a series of questions that could be talked over
at bedtime. I love questions, no matter what the age of the audience,
and the read-aloud moments before bed, when a parent lingers and talks
over what's been read, those feel especially important to me. Why not
put the kind of questions out there that can be pondered while falling
asleep? And if I'm going to be perfectly honest, I'll admit that the
specific target audience was actually the child I was at about four
years old, staying with my family at the beach cabin my grandparents
built. One hot summer night, I was granted the special privilege of
sleeping outside on the open porch; I could hear the waves and see the
moon and stars. It should have been Heaven, but I was terrified. So I
wrote the book for the little girl I was that night, as a way of holding
her hand across the years and telling her it would be alright. And I
knew from the moment I had the idea - before a word was ever written -
who the audience was.

I am going to answer the question by explaining that I have no answer.
(So let's call this a meta-answer.) Perhaps it marks me as a mutant,
curmudgeon, or semi-solipsist, but I generally write with no audience in
mind. I have a story to tell. It seizes me, and I set out to write
it. The only time an imagined audience becomes an issue is when I get
sidetracked by worrying that some group, such as the award givers, or
the fans of whatever genre my last book fell into, will not like my
current work. Then, I have to heave that audience from my mind and get
back to telling a story. That approach seems to be working out pretty
well, so far.

I think, as many writers seem
to think, that I write for myself. I become passionate about
something and have to get it down on the page. Then I try to figure
out what I've got. With Ballet of the Elephants, for example, I
didn't know what I would find when I began to do what would turn out
to be months of research. It took a very long time to figure out how
to tell the story in a way that might make sense for children,
knitting together disparate elements into a whole. When I realized
the story was in the performance itself--in the coming together of
all these geniuses (including Modoc, the elephant and prima
ballerina)--I began to think about the child reader. I'm still not
entirely positive that it's a children's book, and I always promise
myself to do better next time. With my three newer books, Reading to Peanut, The Princess of Borscht, and Feeding the Sheep, I began with
the idea of the child.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Ever since I read Dear Genius, Leonard Marcus's collection of correspondence between Harper and Row editor Ursula Nordstrom and her authors and illustrators, I've been intrigued by the experiences of writers, a few of whom I'm lucky enough to know, who got to work with some of the greatest editors in children's publishing. It seems to me that when I talk to Eleanor Schick, who worked with Ursula herself, I can in some way touch that experience. Vicariously, some semblance of it becomes a part of my narrative as well. In our time, when things are changing more rapidly than ever before, it seems important to me that we acknowledge our links with these editors who left their stamp on the field. Without them, somehow, we would collectively be diminished.

When I was in the Washington DC area in September, I was lucky enough to visit for a while with my friend Barbara Brooks Wallace. Jean was Bobbie's editor. In an editorial letter, she described Bobbie's middle grade novel, Peppermints in the Parlor, as "marvelously funny" and "a true children's Gothic." Bobbie went on to win two Edgar Awards for The Twin in the Tavern and Sparrows in the Scullery. Thirty-one years after its publication, Peppermints is still in print.

In this brief video, Bobbie tells me about the process of submitting Peppermints in the Parlor to Jean Karl, and hearing about its acceptance.

In an e-mail message to me Jeanne wrote, "Such fun! And, it was so exciting for me to be talking...where my book takes place -- his birthplace! I met such nice people, including those at the Harvey Gantt Center for African American Culture which is also hosting a Bearden exhibit. And I spoke at the Family Day at the SFMOMA so I've gotten to be at the two places most important to me for this book."

[Uma] Congratulations, Jeanne. As someone who saw this work in manuscript, a long time before it found its voice and current form, I'm delighted to see it in print. (Note to anyone who doubts the power of e-mail: Jeanne and I have never met in person, yet our creative lives connected indelibly over this work!) I'm so pleased to be talking to you now about My Hands Sing the Blues. So, to start, why Romare Bearden, and why a picture book? Talk about how this project came to be.

[Jeanne] I'm a docent at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a number of years ago I gave tours to school groups of an exhibit organized by The National Gallery of Romare Bearden's amazing art. The students and I LOVED his art, especially his huge collages, and the stories they tell about himself and his African American heritage. I realized I wanted to write a book about how the people, places and experiences in his childhood, specifically Charlotte, North Carolina, influenced his art. I felt this book had to be a picture book because the story is all about the creation of visual art, and I could not be more thrilled by the incredible illustrations Elizabeth Zunon created for this book. I feel magic happens with a picture book -- something incredibly special happens when the illustrations and words are joined.

[Uma] What's one thing you learned about yourself while writing this book?

[Jeanne] I learned that I need to trust my instinct about how a story should be written, even it's outside my comfort zone. I wrote this book in a loose blues format (three line stanzas with end rhymes and repeating phrases) which was totally new to me. I felt that the story I wanted to tell about Romare Bearden needed to be told in this format because of his passion for jazz and blues music. He felt that the way he created his paintings, his collages, was inspired by the give and take, the improvisation of jazz music.

[Uma] What's one thing you learned about writing?

[Jeanne] Trust the writing process/journey because you never know what will happen! I learned to trust that I'll get past the pain of those first "drafty drafts" as you call them.

[Uma] That's right. I won't use the Anne Lamott term, not because I'm squeamish but because I don't believe a draft should be quite so easily dismissed. A first draft contains the spirit that made me want to do the work in the first place, so why should disparaging it make me feel more competent? Drafty I can live with. [Stepping off soapbox...]

[Jeanne] I was enrolled in your online writing course in 2007 with Writers Workshop when I hit this (drafty) phase. I had submitted an early version of this book to the group. But then I reread it and felt remorse that I had let the piece out into public, even though it was a supportive group of writers. I asked you if I could withdraw the piece. You said, hold on. You referred me to your article which so articulately set forth the phases of the writing process:

read, exult

reread, despair

Then you shared one of your tips from your wonderful "20 writing tips that I wish I'd heard 20 years ago": "The beginning is often not what you think it is." You suggested that I begin the book with a line from the middle of my text, "Snip a square of color" which ultimately became "I snip a patch of color." That truly made the difference. My focus became more about Bearden's connections to his childhood, and less about his New York City life as an adult. I was then able to read and absorb the class comments, and move forward.

The last line of my book is what I've ultimately learned about writing and the creative process: "When I put a beat of color on an empty canvas, I never know what's coming down the track." That is, as long as I remember to stick with it and believe in the process!

[Uma] It's true, isn't it, of writing as of any other kind of art? Congratulations on a beautiful book.